Disclaimer: the below may sound particularly philosophical*. I detest philosophical manifestos. All I want to do here is document the impact that my time in Cape Town has had on me. This is not a manifesto; please don’t read it as such. Don’t believe a word of what I say below – get your own philosophy, make up your own mind. For that matter, live without a philosophy – they tend to deteriorate into manifestos.

I first visited Cape Town in January 2000 1 and by April 2000 I had moved down to start work in Wetton and to live in the city bowl. The last eight years have been a transformative time for me, though its roots lie in the last few months of my time in Pretoria. Cape Town has been the psychedelic years and while the tryptamines have long already worked themselves out of my system my brain has been permanently redirected – outward, to the above and below. I feel like the years in Cape Town have been what finally connected me to the reality of the world around me, to people and to the natural world as a physical phenomenon. And as I’m writing this post I feel overcome by an enormous sense of gratitude towards the city, its location at the foot of Table Mountain, its solitary beaches and forests. I firmly believe that the years 2000 to 2004 couldn’t have happened (as they did) anywhere else.

There have been many important things to me while living in Cape Town, friendships and car crashes, but I’ll pick out four which, in particular, made these years as full as they have been. But first, some music; I’ve written a separate mini-post on the electronic music that I discovered in the first four or so years of my time here.

Natural Reality

Cape Town is overcome by natural beauty; built around a mountain, beaching the Atlantic and Indian oceans, home to the most diverse biome on the planet. The more I travel the more I realise how few other cities in the world can claim anything like the natural surrounds that we have here. And even more important than just the pure beauty of the city surrounds is how accessible it is. While living in Vredehoek the slopes of Table Mountain were no more than a short (but steep) walk from my front door.

It was on those slopes with the mountain’s cubic cliffs behind me and the city and ocean down below that I found more and more evidence of the polar simplicity of nature’s random workings. In my experience nature has no glorious, glowing spirit which softly forms its seasons; instead I’ve experienced it as fundamentally simple, basic in the extreme. Its physical structures are formed through nothing more than mathematically repeating patterns. Water molecules know only collision and expansion from heat, but they crest and tumble into rippling waves and clouds. If a plant loses a limb it simply sprouts more similar limbs as its energy allows. Animals appear more complex and unified, but internally everything from the simplest respiration to the neural complexity of the human brain is nothing more than a continuation of the same primitive mechanism of connection upon connection. But nature has no perfect solutions, it survives by what is barely good enough. It’s growth is constantly heading only towards decay. But it does it on such an enormous scale that the result is whole in a way that is endlessly elegant and robust. It attains its form from the minute interactions of billions of individuals and a rolling tide of trillions of trivial events. The natural reality stacks simplicity upon simplicity to form its weather system, its inhabitants and the buried bones of its dead. And the harder I looked at the natural reality the more I saw of myself, how my senses function. In reaching out my hand to a tree there is the potential for a seamless transition from its tessellating bark, across the cells of my skin, along my veins and neurons, into the logic that floats above my wet brain and out into the software that it produces.

From this evidence I’ve come to be of the firm belief that we have nothing outside of our own senses and brain – no soul and no greater death. Why would reality produce something as detached as a soul when it can produce every miracle that humanity has ever observed from the endless collision of its minute parts? The air that waves patterns through the grasslands in front of me also strike my face and rustle my hair and passes by, sweeping away into the distance – there is nothing more that I could want to understand or to observe beyond that. One day I will exhale and the chemical electricity in my brain will run out – why should I want any magical soul to continue past that moment? Its seems anathema to the beauty of the physical reality.

Through Table Mountain’s slopes and Postberg’s atlantic breeze I have become permanently connected to the soil and the air and I want nothing more than to always feel the rolling wash of the matter that surround us.

God

As far as God and religion is concerned I am by no means a militant atheist-type. I believe that religion can have a very positive influence on people’s lives, providing comfort and a life based on integrity, humility and charity. I come from a religious background and even when I eventually rejected organised religion I remained faithful for many years; developing my own sense of a non-interventionist god and his2 natural order. But my personal experiences have continued to show me only one thing; that god does not exist. It’s not that I do not believe that god exists, it’s that I believe (firmly) that god does not exist. The harder I’ve looked at what my senses are capable of, the clearer it has become to me that the natural reality does not need god nor would it originate a god.
I’ll paraphrase John Lennon when he said that he no longer believed in Nixon or in God, he was no longer looking for a father figure; that he would always continue to make music. And despite not being enamored with John Lennon 3 I agree that once I shook the need for a father figure I was finally free from trying to mash the evident reality into a form in which some remote god was in control. There is no such thing and I’ve never felt better.

Individuality

Finally, all paths in the last eight years have led me in only one direction, towards individuality. The harder I’ve looked at reality, at the world I live in, at my ego and delusions, ambitions and irrational fears, I’ve always ended up in the same place – my own identity. But becoming aware of my identity – how it was formed and how it changes – has somehow been no more than a gentle reflection. I started cultivating memories. That’s all it was, I started taking note of how time passed, thinking chronologically and wanting to look back. As I’ve heard and read; happiness is the ability to feel all emotions, and maturity is the experience of sorrow.
I’m sure that I’ve always had a strong individualist streak and I went through periods where I felt the need to illustrate my individualism through wild haircuts and hand-scrawled t-shirts. But I’m overjoyed to say that I no longer need those props. And I feel like, more than just due to growing older, it has been these years that let me recognise my individuality – to claim it. I no longer need eyeliner – I’m forever changed. I’m older and calmer – more confident and accepting. I’ve finally become confirmed in who I am and what I believe. I continue to want to simplify how I describe what I see while developing my ability to perceive the massive, accelerating complexity of our world. And Cape Town’s silver trees have given me the examples and evidence that led me here.

Nothing lasts… nothing lasts. Everything is changing into something else. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing is wrong. Everything is on track. William Blake said nothing is lost and I believe that we all move on.
T. McKenna

I will never forget the buzzing September sound of the bees among the pincushions on the slopes of Table Mountain and the hum of the city below.

And so, good night sweet Cape Town – I will never be the same and I will always come back.

Man, I really don’t feel like spending too much energy on this. I’m sooo over Sarah Palin, but feel that I should at least document the passage of time. Will she win[1]? I don’t know, but I do think that it is likely that America’s wobbly middle is strong enough in their collective delusions/beliefs to make it happen. And by now it is clear that Palin wasn’t chosen to reel in the female vote; her mission is to bring Christianity to the McCain campaign, and by extension to the world. Hot damn, I can’t wait.

America’s most glorious believer had the following to say in a recent interview on US network television when questioned on her immediate willingness to jump aboard the McCain ticket.

I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on — reform of this country and victory in the war — you can’t blink.

That’s a hectic thing to say; describing yourself in such militaristic terms; on a mission, a mission of country and victory and war.

God’s own fist

Here’s more from the interview

Charles Gibson: [you said], “There is a plan and it is God’s plan.”

Palin: I believe that there is a plan for this world and that plan for this world is for good. I believe that there is great hope and great potential for every country to be able to live and be protected with inalienable rights that I believe are God-given, Charlie, and I believe that those are the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That, in my world view, is a grand — the grand plan.

CG: But then are you sending your son on a task that is from God?

P: I don’t know if the task is from God, Charlie. What I know is that my son has made a decision. I am so proud of his independent and strong decision he has made, what he decided to do and serving for the right reasons and serving something greater than himself and not choosing a real easy path where he could be more comfortable and certainly safer.

God’s own family

Ok now I’m scared. There are several things here that freak me out but I won’t bother with the obvious absurdity of linking the rights of nation states to God’s plan for the world, or how unsophisticated it is to present God’s perceived grand plan as always being the American concept of life, liberty and happiness. But her concept of her son’s ‘decision’ is ludicrous. There is nothing ‘independent’ about Track Palin’s[2] decision. How could his decision possibly be independent when his mom cannot help but to remind him that it is serving for the right reasons and serving something greater than himself? He has been given from his mother’s bosom to serve as God’s own man, in God’s own family from God’s own land.
There is no trace of individual strength in this young man’s glorious conformity.

One of the things I most admired about the US in my first visit there, in particular in Washington, was how people – everyone – expressed their opinions in the form of t-shirts, flags, tattoos and bumper stickers. And it doesn’t matter that the majority of the opinions expressed were mundane or lame or idiotic[1], the fact that people so willingly blurt out their opinion is a good thing™.

My favourite bumper sticker from that trip was this one, sold by a hairy bunch of anti-war protesters on the lawn outside the Smithsonian.

During a previous trip to Atlanta I also noticed quite a few humanist[1]/animist/atheist/fringe bumper stickers that suggests that while the vast majority of the US is solidly moderate they are tolerant of both very liberal and very conservative groups. To be honest, I’ve never encountered even a vague trace of political correctness in the good ol’ US of fuckin’A. These are all good things.

I’ve recently been reading several atheist blogs[4] and while I am rapidly tiring of them[5] there have been some funny stuff. One of these is a post of a bunch of atheist aphorisms via the Friendly Atheist – many are dull but some of are actually quite funny. But there is one in particular that I liked and thought that if it were slightly toned down it would make a good bumper sticker.

Naturally my first stop was MakeStickers.com and after trawling through their templates I got it to spit out a sample.

I’m not really sure whether the bible works, but that is the closest to relevant graphic that they have on offer. So I took it upon myself to unleash my Powerpoint skillz and produce my own. First I had to locate a suitable graphic based on proposals for atheist symbols from No Ghosts. These symbols produced prototypes [1], [2] and [3] but in the end I settled on my own.

The question is whether, if I were to be the owner of a car in the US, I would stick it on my bumper. I wouldn’t – but not because I would feel nervous about offending others[6] but I because just don’t feel that strongly about atheism – I’d rather say something about individuality and opinion – ‘Get a bumper sticker! Blurt out your opinion! We’ll all feel so much better.’

I was recently browsing my local Christian book/music store[1] when I noticed two music albums displayed in the same area whose covers immediately struck me as interesting. They are Michael W. Smith’s Worship Box Set and Hosanna!’s Experience His Presence.

Michael W. Smith – Worship Box Set

Hosanna! – Experience His Presence

I’ve always been interested in the brain chemistry behind[2] powerful emotional experiences and in particular religious experiences. The little that I know about the neurotransmitters that influence our emotional responses has been gathered from some lite reading into the effects of certain illicit chemicals, particularly traditional psychedelics. Now let me state immediately that I’m not convinced that religious experiences are purely chemical, though I do think that psychedelic experiences are[3]. But it certainly seems plausible that brain chemistry plays a significant part in religious experiences and that psychedelics and other drugs (particularly Ecstasy[4]) produce a very similar experience.
But that’s not really what I’m interested in here, other people can argue to what extent religious/spiritual experiences are produced by brain functions. What I am interested in is these two fucking album covers. Aren’t they wild? Think about it for a second; the purpose of a music album cover[5] is to give some sort of visual form to the tone/mood/content of the music it wraps. The best art that accompanies music are those images that connect with the intention of the music without bluntly shaping what the listener should experience. R.E.M.’s cover for Murmur might be slightly pretentious, but it does have a very subtle connection with the mood of the music that makes it one of my favourites. So check out these two covers; they practically blurt out ‘Hey man! Listen to this! Feel God’s closeness! It’s like a fucking explosion in your head, yeah! It’s gonna rock!!‘.

But the fact that these are poor covers is still not what I’m interested in. What’s interesting is that this is the experience that they want to associate with Christian worship[6] – the experience of a fucking firecracker going off in your head. Other worship music might emphasise experiences of redemption(tears) or hope(doves descending from heaven) or love(open arms), but these want that fucking explosion in the head. That is a very psychedelic thing; to emphasise the listener’s experience of an opening of the head is a radical thing to do. And the link to a psychedelic experience is undeniable. The mental state portrayed by the Michael W. Smith cover is the same as that produced by a rush of bent serotonin/dopamine at the peak of a psychedelic experience.
I certainly don’t begrudge anyone this state however they may choose to produce or explain it. Whether you believe that the spirit of a god has ascended within you or that you’ve broken through an inter dimensional divide or simply that you’ve flipped a switch in the beautiful circuitry that is your brain is up to you. But it blows my mind that this state, an explosion of the mind, is what these albums emphasise of the worship experience. What’s important here is not the presence of God, but the worshiper’s own glowing mind.

[1] As one does
[2] Or, at least, contributing to
[3] I’m strongly opposed to the idea that DMT will actually let you contact other dimensions for real. I don’t buy that shit.
[4] Let’s not bullshit around and call it MDMA/MDA or whatever other ‘legitimising’ term peeps use. It’s a drug, it’s Ecstasy – there’s no need to apologise for it.
[5] Or any piece of art that accompanies another piece of art, think book covers
[6] Of course not all Christian worship music, but theirs.
[7] Yes, I know, the images are specifically selected to emphasise their similarity and are therefore not a real representation of the relationship between religion and raves blah blah – bite me.

PS as I mentioned a little earlier I’m not really interested in the debate around whether religious experiences are chemically induced or not, but in looking around I’ve come across some images that you might find entertaining.

I know virtually nothing about Islam apart from what is beamed into my house by CNN.

Despite its generally conservative image[1] Islam is a mystic religion. Visiting the Alhambra I was struck not only by the ornate forms of the royal buildings, but also by the esoteric nature of the arabesque detail on the buildings. Apparently the purpose of their infinite patterns[2] are to provide a form of meditative contemplation for the devotee without the idolatry that Islam so rejects. I hesitate to call them psychedelic, but jihad they’re not. Whether the modern imams like it or not, hashish has to have been sacramental in those wild days in the desert chasing camels with Dean Moriarty.

Traditional Islamic mysticism is ascribed to the Sufis with their gnostic universal-love approach to Allah[3]. And it would be easy for mainstream Islam to write off the mystic aspects of their religion as the Sufi black sheep domain of an otherwise austere and reserved family. But recently reading the story of the Buraq and Mohammed’s Harry Potter-esque flight to heaven is just too much fun to ignore – Father Christmas on a horse.

Islam’s Fire

By his own account Mohammed was a straight and narrow kinda guy but he did go for one wild midnitely ride from Mecca to Jerusalem to heaven and back – this is the story of a horse named Buraq.
This episode in Mohammed’s life is a key point in the establishment of Islam and, as such, has had a profound influence on Islamic thought. It is, in short, the story of Mohammed’s enlightenment as he was carried off to heaven by angels where he beheld the true face of Allah. Apart from the temptation-and-locusts thing it fits into Mohammed’s life in a very similar way to the 40 days that Jesus spent in the desert before starting his ministry.
The consensus seems to be that this episode was originally two separate events, the first being Mohammed’s journey from Mecca to Jerusalem (the Isra) and the second his ascension to heaven (the Meraj). For better campfire retelling effect the two stories were combined into one as follows.

We meet Mohammed, by now in his forties, a pious man who has been awakened to his prophetic destiny where he is resting at the Kabaa in the holiest mosque in Mecca, presumably after a long day’s worship. He is met by the archangel Gabriel who has brought with him a winged horse/mule/donkey with the face of a woman; a gentle creature to carry him together with Gabriel, who has his own set of wings, to Jerusalem. They zoom off into the night; no mention is made of an in-flight movie or reclining seats.
Upon their arrival in Jerusalem he meets Abraham, Moses and Jesus – Allah’s prophets prior to Mohammed. Mohammed then leads the gathered prophets in prayer, thereby neatly confirming his position as god’s numero uno messenger.

The Buraq and her Unseen Passenger

After the prayers we continue on the second part of Mohammed’s journey, the Meraj, in which Buraq carries him up into the heavens where he visits hell and paradise – each of the seven heavenly cosmic dimensions. The visions of hell and heaven are combinations of the usual items: fire, blood, terror, peaceful gardens, lions lying with lambs, glorious heavenly choirs and such.
At each level he is greeted by a resident angel and one of the (by now) lesser prophets, some of whom (especially Moses) seem to take pains to indicate that god does, in fact, favour Mohammed over themselves and Mohammed’s followers over their own. Some very convenient and helpful exchanges for later rebuffing of other imam’s claims[4].
Having toured the first six levels of heaven Mohammed has to enter the seventh on his own, Gabriel can take him no further. Here Mohammed encounters god himself in the form of Allah. He sees a radiant multi-coloured tree and has his true destiny revealed to him.
From here we do not know what happened to Mohammed, but I assume that the return flight was uneventful.

Heavenly Fire

So let’s recap, Mohammed is swept away by a handsome angel on a winged horse from his slumber in Mecca to Jerusalem where they meet up with other great prophets in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. From there he is wooshed up to heaven to behold all the wonders and horrors of the afterlife and meets up with the big G-o himself. Finally he is returned home before sunrise to take on his role as glorious prophet of Allah.

This is a very cynical take on the story of Mohammed’s journey, but only because orthodox Islam insists on it being literally true[5], though there are credible interpretations of this episode as either a dream or a symbolic representation of Mohammed’s enlightenment. This is similar to the common modern Christian view that, yes, Noah did in fact load two polar bears onto his boat. And yes, there will be four actual guys on four actual horses and it’s gonna suck something horrible for non-believers.
In all three these cases the stories suffer because of it. Why does orthodox religion ridicule their own beautiful fables by insisting that its true? Oh, of course, because, as we know by now, if one part of the Koran can be interpreted as a dream or a vision or simply a folk tale woven into a people’s everyday faith, then other parts of the Koran become open to the same interpretation. Blah blah blah. The Koran, the Bible, the Torah – ‘we must fucking CONTROL the truth, we must control what is true! It must all be true!‘ – both the faith and the religion suffers as a result.

But I do find it funny, and re-assuring, that a religion that comes across as so severe(especially to non-believers) has such a cute flight of fantasy[6] at such a crucial point in its protagonist’s narrative.
Like all major religions the generations of paternalistic enforcement of social dogma cannot hide the fact that its most beautiful stories and images are drugged-out fantasies and wild party yarns. Rock on.

[1] or is it non-image?
[2] not quite fractal, but certainly fundamentally organic
[3] unity with god and so forth; in fana – ‘Praise be to me; how great is my majesty’
[4] This is starting to sound a little like a CIA-commissioned report into the conduct of their operatives
[5] one night, one horse, a bazillion miles
[6] pun unavoidable